The German language does it best – giving us single words that can be translated only into longish English sentences. Take sturmfrei, for instance. Literally “storm free’, it means something like “When your parents are away, and you have the whole house to yourself.” Or, a personal favourite, Backpfeifengesicht, which means, “A face that begs to be slapped.” Such useful words to work into a conversation.
Then there’s pantoffelheld, literally a “slipper hero”, for “ a man who may act tough in front of his friends but can’t stand up for himself against his wife.” It describes to a ‘T’ some of my former newspaper bosses.
At the recent release of Shelf Aware by V.R. Ferose, technocrat and book collector, we discovered we each had many books we hadn’t read yet. This is not unusual. Most people who care for books and have a few at home have a percentage that is permanently unread – not the same books, but roughly the same percentage.
Ferose pays a small fortune for antiquarian and significant books – like the one inscribed to Gandhi by Tagore and another inscribed to Tagore by Gandhi. He once paid five thousand dollars for a limited edition book. Ironical, considering he began by picking up cheap pirated copies sold on the streets of Chennai. Sometimes book collecting can tell the story of success and accomplishment more subtly than a biography can!
A couple of days after that session at Bengaluru’s Bookworm store, I looked for a German word that translated into a version of “the art of buying books and never reading them. ”I didn’t find one, but I found a word in Japanese: Tsundoku. It is not a recent construction, having been used as far back as in 1879, although even Alexander the Great (whose favourite book was Homer’s Iliad) must have had unread books in his library.
So too must writers like Umberto Eco and Colin Wilson. They, like Alberto Manguel were in possession of at least 30,000 volumes. Manguel has a house in France just for his books. “Unread books are much more valuable than read ones,” wrote Nassim Taleb, the Lebanese-American essayist, who called the unread collection the ‘anti-library’. The more you know, he said, the larger the row of unread books.
Clearly then, Tsundoku is not a term of insult. It carries no stigma. Two words, meaning ‘to read’ and ‘to pile up’ came together to give us a new word which stands for an old habit.
Perhaps two more words need to be added to those to describe the passion and hunger of collectors like Ferose.
How is Tsundoku different from bibliomania? Someone pointed out a key difference: while bibliomania is the intention to create a book collection, tsundoku is the intention to read books – collecting them is a by-product.
I am not sure I agree with that distinction. But I will end here or I might be guilty of Verschlimmbessern. That’s German for “making something worse by trying to improve it.”
